As you know, GreyMatter produces a special Christmas commentary each year. This time, we thought it would be great to celebrate one of the finest works of Christmas and Christian literature. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is 181 years old this year. Although many today treat it as a child’s ghost story, it was originally written for—and continues to have—a very adult message. It has multiple layers of meaning. It is a masterpiece of a short story.
After all, who else could put the Grim Reaper, aka the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, into a Christmas story and make it all work?
In case there is anyone yet unfamiliar with this classic Victorian novella, Ebenezer Scrooge is a famously wealthy, unhappy, selfish, greedy money changer. The story begins on Christmas Eve day, when Scrooge calls Christmas a “humbug”, abuses his long suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit whose large family includes the lame Tiny Tim, refuses requests for charity, and rejects his nephew’s attempt to bring him into the family fold.
That fateful evening, Scrooge goes home to his empty mansion, which once belonged to his long-dead partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge receives a visit from Marley’s ghost, who drags around the clanking, heavy chains of his cold, avaricious life. He foretells that Scrooge will be visited by Three Spirits offering him a last chance to redeem himself.
Over the ensuing hours, Scrooge is first visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, who takes Scrooge on a tour through his life, highlighting how he decayed from an open, loving young man into a mean miser, alienating all who loved him.
Next, he meets the Ghost of Christmas Present, who lets Scrooge see into the happy but imperfect homes of Bob Crachit and his nephew, as well as showing Scrooge that ignorance and want plague the earth.
Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come casts Scrooge into the Future, where he sees the Cratchit family mourning Tiny Tim’s death and then—to his horror—sees the greed and happiness surrounding his own celebrated demise.
When a broken Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning, he thrills to discover that he still has time to make amends and, as Dickens writes,
“it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”
Let us now highlight seven abiding themes from the story that have something to say about we grown-ups.
First, our lives are accountable. Although not explicitly Christian, the Carol is very Christian in its perspective that we reap what we sow. We see this with the damned Jacob Marley, and it is the central motif of the Scrooge story: i.e. what he is has been influenced by his own choices and which—should he persist in them—“will foreshadow certain ends.” Life, in this sense, is eminently just.
Second, death is the great equalizer. Carol’s three main characters all truck with death. “Marley was dead” opens the tale, and his ghost is sent to warn Scrooge “you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.” Scrooge toys with whether or not to mend his ways until the stark reality of his own tombstone terminates his vacillations. Whether Tiny Tim lives or dies is also the key suspense upon which our attention turns. As Hebrews reminds us, “it is appointed for men once to die.”
Third, how we treat others is how we shall in turn be treated. Scrooge has no compunction about pushing others aside, using them, treating them transactionally, as objects rather than subjects; but he never reckons with the truth that what goes around, comes around. Much of Scrooge’s shock at his future is just how dispensable and insignificant he is. His associates agree to attend his funeral upon stipulation that they “must be fed”, only one volunteering to go without a meal. Vigil beside his pilfered body is kept only by rats. Two debtors rejoice, since Scrooge’s death buys them a reprieve; a pair of charwomen rejoice because his death provides them with something to pawn. Scrooge is thus not so repulsed by an eternity of heaven or hell as by a funeral of indifference.
Fourth, truth is inescapable. The Spirit of Christmas Past appears with a light shining from its head, something that initially annoys Scrooge and which he later crushes—driving away the Spirit with a candle snuffer.
“I bear the light of truth.”
The light of truth forces Scrooge to face his past honestly: those things that were done to him about which he was powerless (an uncaring father) as well as those he chose (his breakup with Belle). While Scrooge is ready to look at the past through selective, rose-coloured glasses, the Spirit compels him to open his eyes—to see the impoverishment of his life against the rich happiness Belle discovered as a wife and mother with another man.
Fifth, happiness does not require much. Scrooge reflects upon happy memories of Christmas balls as an apprentice to “old man Fezziwig”. The Ghost of Christmas Past challenges him:
“He spent but a few pounds of your mortal money, three or four perhaps.”
And yet, decades later, we see that with Scrooge, memory of those three or four pounds is still compounding interest, albeit not a sum reckoned on one of his bank ledgers.
Sixth, now is the moment to bring happiness. In a scene most often omitted from cinematic versions of the tale, Dickens describes what Scrooge sees after Marley leaves him. Marley exits from Scrooge’s window to join a chorus of damned spirits whose presence on Scrooge’s little street suddenly become apparent. He sees “One old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step.”
Dickens is blunt:
“The misery of them all was…that they sought to interfere, for good in human matters, and had lost the power forever.”
Life is when we can touch life, and the time to do that is fleeting.
Finally, life is to be valued; not just for its usefulness, but because it is a gift about which we must not presume. Early on, when asked to contribute to pauper relief, Scrooge is told that some of the poor “would rather die.” His callous response is
“Then let them die and decrease the surplus population.”
Later, when watching Tiny Tim, Scrooge expresses sympathy for the boy but is rebuked with his own words by the Ghost of Christmas Present:
“It may be that in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child!…To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
How much of that rebuke might fit our modern globalist anti-life Bill Gates set!
It is said that, when he was President during the Great Depression & WWII era, FDR would read A Christmas Carol aloud on Christmas Eve to his family at the White House. The kiddos may enjoy the ghosts, the scares, Tiny Tim, and the eventual happy ending; but might be challenged by the original. Dickens was writing, after all, in 1843, when literacy rates and vocabulary comprehension were higher than today; but perhaps that is all the more reason for we adults to sit down this Christmas season with the original, unadulterated text and savour—nearly two centuries after Dickens put pen to paper—what lessons A Christmas Carol still speaks to the grown-ups in the room.
Sadly, some of these adults miss the preceding points entirely and insist instead that Ebenezer Scrooge is actually a communist—albeit one who feels remorse and then repents and seeks redemption. If you hang around with leftists (and I pray that you do not, especially at Christmas), they will tell you that A Christmas Carol is an indictment of capitalism, even as they dismiss bourgeoisie notions about reform. According to a piece in the The English Middle Class Marxist Internet Archive:
“His legacy has been claimed by many. Bourgeois commentators stress his reforming zeal, claiming that he influenced a benevolent process of reform from above that, they say, characterised Victorian Britain. Even Prince Charles recently hailed Dickens’ ‘use of creative genius…to campaign passionately for social justice.’ (Daily Telegraph, 7 February 2012)…What they neglect to mention of course, was his anger, even despair, at the callous indifference, of ‘the great and the good’ to the plight of the poor, and official inaction against the abuses he exposed. Even the sale of pauper boys as chimney sweeps was not finally banned until 1875, five years after Dickens’ death, and nearly 40 years after his novel, Oliver Twist, denounced the practice…On the other hand, radicals, reformers, and socialists, from the Chartists to Tony Ben, have used his grim depictions of the workhouse, child abuse, prisons, bureaucratic incompetence of the state, and the cold inhumanity of factory owners, to inform their struggle for a better society. Karl Marx said that the great Victorian novelists, Dickens, Thackeray, and the Brontes ‘have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together.”
The bourgeoise class is quite correct here. As the same article quoted above acknowledges, Dickens was no socialist. His ideas were purely middle-class, focused upon personal betterment and the voluntary community being responsible for mending social ills.
I am hardly the first to point this out, but I would like to move the focus from the novella in its entirety to Scrooge specifically. Ebenezer Scrooge, before his conversion, is not just a mean old miser. He is the ultimate Western communist. Every expression he makes aligns with post-modern leftist values.
First, he is obsessed with money. Remember that the Bible does not say that money is evil; it states that love of money is the root of all evil. Nobody is more money obsessed than Western leftists. Many of them falsely declare Marxism to be an economic system; but it is more accurately a cult that, in the 19th century, used money as its selling point. Today, it uses culture to sell the cult. It is Marxists who place a monetary value on all things, including human beings. They are the ultimate materialists.
Second, Scrooge hates Christmas. There is only subtle distinction between “Bah! Humbug”. and the left’s insistence on removing Christmas from the public square. Whether it is ending churches services on public lands, the singing of Christmas carols in schools, or the very expression “Merry Christmas.”
Third, Scrooge’s hatred for Christmas means that he also hates Christianity. The left has been engaged in an ongoing attack on Judaeo-Christian principles for over a century. My 2023 Christmas commentary, “Woke Christmas” sets this out in great detail. Leftists understand that we can serve but one master and for them, the ultimate dialectic struggle is between the state and God. The latest front in this war is the battle against sexual binary, which is integral to the Biblical creation story. Scrooge, by disdaining celebration of Christ’s birth, thus shows us by implication that he also hates Christianity.
Scrooge also believes that government charity displaces private charity. Studies and polls consistently show that conservatives give more to charity. It is simple to divine why: leftists believe that it is the government’ exclusive responsibility to care for widows and orphans. Scrooge clearly agrees. Consider this memorable dialogue from the story:
“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge’ said the gentleman, taking up a pen, ‘it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries: hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.’
‘Are there no prisons?’ Asked Scrooge.
‘Plenty of prisons’ said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
‘And the Union workhouses?’ Demanded Scrooge. ‘Are they still in operation?’
‘They are Still’ returned the gentleman, ‘I wish I could say they were not.’
‘The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour then?’ Said Scrooge.
‘Both very busy, sir.’
‘Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their usual course’ said Scrooge. ‘I am very glad to hear it.’
‘Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,’ returned the gentleman, ‘a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?’
‘Nothing!’ Scrooge replied.
‘You wish to be anonymous?’
‘I wish to be left alone’ Said Scrooge. ‘Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
This is chilling, but not nearly so much so as blandly advocating elimination of 7 out of 8 living persons.
Modern communists also hate prisons and do not think that people should work for welfare, but the underlying principle remains: each holds that, because of government institutions, the widows and orphans are the state’s responsibility.
Scrooge clearly supports depopulation. Leftists have long held that the planet is overpopulated and that human herds must therefore be culled. This too is anti-Christian since it is antithetical to the Biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” and extreme Gaia worship—pre-Christian paganism. In 2006, for example, University of Texas ecologist Eric Pianka announced that 90% of all humans must die to save the planet. Both the WEF and UN are dedicated to depopulation.
When Scrooge insists to the gentlemen seeking donations that the workhouses are already in place, obviating the need for him to contribute further, one of them explains
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
Scrooge’s response would make leftists proud:
“If they would rather die…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Thankfully, by the close of the story, Scrooge recognizes that government is not responsible for healing the world’s ills, nor would the world be better off if the human population were culled. Instead, as Dickens makes clear—and Christmas reminds us—each of us is “our brother’s keeper”, and it is up to us, through our personal choices, to improve life for all.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is arguably the most famous and beloved Christmas tale ever told. It can stake a claim as one of the most recognizable stories of any seasonal variety. It has become as much a staple of the Christmas season as coloured lights, presents under trees, and chocolate advent calendars. In fact, so integral is this tale to the holiday season that one Dickens biography (and later a movie) was boldly entitled The Man Who Invented Christmas. Dickens’ own religious convictions would have led him to reject this lofty and erroneous epithet, but such praise testifies to the importance and popularity of the Carol.
Why has this simple story resonated so profoundly across generations? Dickens is firmly entrenched in the annals of literary greats, and the ‘Christmas factor’ is undeniable— everything is better at Yuletide, right?; but the enduring power of A Christmas Carol transcends these factors. I believe that the secret to its greatness is that at the very heart of this story we find the Christian Gospel. Let me explain what I mean by this.
“Marley was dead…”
A jarringly grim, three word opening for a festive tale; but it is a perfect beginning, both literally and thematically. Despite being associated with a glorious birth, the meaning of the Christmas season must start, paradoxically, with the inevitability of death. The gift of salvation, through Jesus, was only made necessary because the wages of sin are death
(Romans 6:23).
Equally memorable is our introduction to the character of Ebenezer Scrooge:
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”
As readers, we typically like to align ourselves with the noble heroes of any moral tale. In Christ’s parable of the prodigal son, we are the loving and forgiving Father, or perhaps the returned son (post-restoration); but rarely the self-righteous and jealous elder brother. Thus, in A Christmas Carol, we naturally place ourselves in the position of the good-hearted ‘everyman’ Bob Cratchit, or as Fred, Scrooge’s cheerfully optimistic nephew. Seldom do we see ourselves in the impeached role of Scrooge himself.
Even Scrooge fails to recognize his true role in the tale. Only by the ghostly visitation of his “dead as a doornail” business partner is his sight miraculously restored to the reality of his own sinful and wretched nature. The wages of sin are visualized by the tormented Marley:
“I wear the chain I forged in life…I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob”, faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. Scrooge, like so many of us, hides behind empty platitudes of being a “good person”, working hard and achieving material success. Yet, Marley’s ghost laments:
“Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode!”
Romans 3:23 declares, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Whether we accept it or not, we are Scrooge in this morality tale; but, like him, it is not the end of our story. There is yet redemption for us all.
The Gospel is core to A Christmas Carol, but the story is still not a true Christian allegory. The three Christmas spirits are not stand-ins for the Holy Trinity; nor does Scrooge receive Salvation in a theological sense. His story nevertheless paints a vivid picture of redemption. Scrooge is transformed by his encounters with the Three Spirits—The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. He catches a glimpse of this lost innocence, an almost Edenic and dreamlike Christmas paradise. He is shown the despairing truth of his current life; and lastly, he is reminded of eternity and the consequences of death. Upon waking from the final spectral visitation, Scrooge is reborn. The old Ebenezer has passed away. Finally, he vows to change:
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”
The good news of the story is that no one, not even crotchety old Scrooge, is too far gone for redemption:
“What’s to-day my fine fellow?” Said Scrooge.
“To-day!”replied the boy. “Why, Christmas Day.”
“It’s Christmas Day!”said Scrooge to himself. “I haven’t missed it.”
As the criminal crucified beside Jesus reminds us—short of death—there is no expiration date placed upon the invitation into heavenly paradise. What makes A Christmas Carol so heartwarming is not just that Scrooge is redeemed, but that he still has time to share his newfound Christmas spirit and bless those around him—none more so than feeble Tiny Tim.
A Christmas Carol remains as timely and profound today as it was when Dickens first published it in 1843. We do not outgrow the Gospel or our need to be reminded of it. Jesus taught that we should come to Him like children, and perhaps nothing connects us back to childhood quite like Christmas.
As the Ghost of Christmas Present helps Scrooge to realize:
“It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.”
As we enjoy this special season, let us embrace the true spirit of Christmas. Furthermore, let us fix our sights upon the amazing Gospel story that gives power and meaning to Christmas and our most beloved seasonal tales.
Happy Christmas to you and yours, from all of us at GreyMatter & Miracle Channel!
